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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35173 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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It's a Vibes-based World for Us

The New Yorker recently printed a piece about a conflict among parents, politicians, and educators centered on childhood literacy. One group wants teachers to use a variation of whole language learning, a method based on immersing kids in books and showing them how to connect words with images. The other wants teachers to use a method called phonics where children are taught to sound out letters and groups of letters, allowing them voice whole words.

Currently, whole language learning dominates curricula in the US school system, with some 60% of children being taught using it--especially in urban areas. Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.

This is why some states and cities have begun ordering their teacher to switch to phonics. It's happening in New York City, for example, where whole language learning has been the preferred method for almost twenty years. It's happening in Oakland, CA, where groups like NAACP or REACH (an educational advocacy group), are putting pressure on local school districts to get teachers to use phonics.

But to what do we owe the pleasure of putting tens of millions of kids through the less effective of the two teaching methods?

The New Yorker piece author points to vibes.

According to what she found, whole language learning gained popularity among both teachers and parents because it painted a rosy, feel-good image of literacy education. The method's supporters maintain that children should be put in a book-rich environment and the rest will take care of itself--"through proximity or osmosis", as the New Yorker writer sarcastically describes it. And the teacher's role? To ask encouraging questions, such as why an author chose to use a certain color or why a character was represented by a certain animal.

The author delicately points out another reason why so many favor whole language learning over phonics: politics. Through some clever rhetoric, whole language learning has positioned itself as a counter to the authoritarian, regimented phonics approach, where children have to go through regular letter-sounding drills and have to read the same set of books.

Kenneth Goodman, a famous proponent of whole language learning, said phonics is steeped in "negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity." Basically, phonics codes "conservative", and that often was enough to get whole school districts to move away from it, damn whatever researchers say about its effectiveness.

Well, this is all an interesting story that explains a lot about how the education system works. (I would also recommend this 1997 The Atlantic piece to get an even broader picture). But what really struck me about the whole thing is that it's not just vibes-based literacy, it's literally vibes all the way down:

Whole language learning is a vibes-based approach to teaching kids how to read. It's supported by vibes-based academics doing vibes-based science. It's put into practice by vibes-based policymakers. It's supported by vibes-based parents and vibes-based teachers.

Even the New Yorker writer, despite building a strong case for using science-backed phonics, abandons her position at the end, going instead for vibes. She concludes her piece by stating that it's tempting to focus our energies on changing concrete things like school curricula, but what we should really be doing is attacking larger, more abstract problems like poverty and structural racism.

It's a vibes-based world out there. So lay down your arguments, your charts and numbers, your ideas on cause and effect, and start vibing.

It seems like nothing works well , or that no method is superior to any other method, which agrees with Freddie Deboer's posts on education. Educators have tried every possible approach , and yet nothing can overcome innate individual differences in learning ability. Smarter kids will pick up reading faster regardless of which method is used.

This seems right, phonics 'working' [might i will read more] come out of the same body of knowledge that produced learning styles, growth mindset, etc. The comparison to learning spoken language seems obvious - there isn't a "phonics" for spoken language, you just learn it via immersion!

No. Literacy does have to be taught, you don't just "pick it up". Phonics works. Whole word learning doesn't. I suspect that to the extent students in whole-word programs learn, it's because someone has been teaching them another way. So the question is why educators are so attached to a system which doesn't work?

I suspect that to the extent students in whole-word programs learn, it's because someone has been teaching them another way

this is obviously false, I'm confident you'll find someone who was homeschooled with whole-word only and learned it fine. People and intelligence are flexible, you can learn things in poor and slow ways and still learn them, and the claim was that whole-word was less effective than phonics, not that it didn't work. Just compare it to language learning - if you have a smart kid and he does whole-word, even if it is greatly inferior to phonics, couldn't the kid figure out all the tough bits themselves the same way a smart kid does that for other things?

from the article:

These students are more likely to be growing up in homes full of books, Shanahan said, among adults with the time and ability to read aloud to them. It is most likely these lucky children, in fact, who at some point “just know” how to read—who bear out Calkins’s theory of literacy by vibes, because these kids are already marinating in those vibes at home. “And that’s where this gets to be noxious,” Shanahan said. “It’s undoubtedly true that many kids will learn to read with this program. But it’s also probably true that the percentage of kids who learn to read will be lower, and the average achievement level will be lower.”

It’s a common belief among early-reading experts that roughly forty per cent of children can learn to read fluently without much direct instruction. “Those are the people who grow up to say, ‘I don’t remember how I learned to read; I just did it,’ ” Leah Wasserman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist in Brooklyn, told me. “But about sixty per cent need some level of explicit instruction, and those kids are not going to do well with Teachers College. If a kid doesn’t know how to match letters and sounds, or to sound out and segment and blend, they’re not learning to read. They’re not going to naturally intuit how to do that in twenty or thirty minutes of free reading.” And because those blocks of time are mainly devoted to silent reading, children aren’t demonstrating their understanding of letter sounds—they aren’t, to borrow a term from math class, showing their work.

What’s more, Susan Neuman told me, some clever members of the sixty per cent may be able to feint their way through books for early readers, and so the true extent of their lack of decoding skills may not emerge until as late as third grade. (In 2011, a national study of four thousand students found that a child who is not reading proficiently by third grade is four times as likely to drop out of high school or graduate late as those who are, or eight times as likely if that child is also Black or Hispanic and affected by poverty.)

So, this is the kind of argumentation that sounds like "evidence", because "shanahan said!", "wasserman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist, told me", but could easily be wrong. Going with it as true, though - the way the quotes are strung together seems to hint-hint that most of the "roughly forty per cent of children [that] can learn to read fluently without much direct instruction" learned it at home - but I don't think the parents are all doing phonics at home, and nowhere does it say that all of those 40% are explicitly taught it at home, especially with phonics. And taking the claim "It’s undoubtedly true that many kids will learn to read with this program. But it’s also probably true that the percentage of kids who learn to read will be lower, and the average achievement level will be lower." literally also suggests that both work.

None of this is really compatible with "Phonics works. Whole word learning doesn't. I suspect that to the extent students in whole-word programs learn, it's because someone has been teaching them another way".

this is obviously false, I'm confident you'll find someone who was homeschooled with whole-word only and learned it fine.

So you've got nothing?

but I don't think the parents are all doing phonics at home

I think they are. An unstructured version of it, but teaching them the sounds for the letters and having them try to figure out unfamiliar words by putting the letter-sounds together is pretty common.

so you've got nothing

just "It’s a common belief among early-reading experts that roughly forty per cent of children can learn to read fluently without much direct instruction. “Those are the people who grow up to say, ‘I don’t remember how I learned to read; I just did it,’ ” Leah Wasserman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist in Brooklyn, told me. “But about sixty per cent need some level of explicit instruction, and those kids are not going to do well with Teachers College"

I think they are. An unstructured version of it

sure, but 'whole word' style also has portions of an unstructured version of phonics! just showing single-syllable words together with their pronunciation is enough for that. And that's enough for a particularly smart kid to learn from.

How much of whole word learning is actually phonics? Two fifths of it maybe?

Homeschoolers hate whole word learning and I doubt you can find a homeschool curriculum that used it.

This is addressed a little bit in the New Yorker piece. Researchers agree that literacy teaching is difficult to measure because some kids just seem to pick it up quickly, some take a long time, and yet others learn to fake literacy very well until 3rd or even 4th grade. She also raises the point that the kids that do well in whole language learning programs probably come from well off households that have many books and where the family actually spends time reading.

That said, I believe the main point about phonics is that it is able to bring kids who struggle with reading up to speed faster than other methods. These struggling kids include both those with dyslexia as well as those from poor families. If this is true, then I would expect phonics to have little effect, except maybe annoyance, for the smart or lucky kids, but it would be a huge help for poor/dyslexic kids.

Anecdotally, some amount of private tutoring is incredibly widespread among rich kids in the US, and private tutoring(sylvan etc) uses phonics almost exclusively. Engaged parents also frequently teach some basic phonics rules about silent e’s and soft c’s, and smart kids tend to figure some out on their own without having to be explicitly taught.

Combine the three, and wealthy districts can achieve a fair amount of success with the whole word method then quietly shuffle anyone who fell through the cracks into remedial classes that use phonics until they’re caught up. Poor districts just suffer.

I think this correctly sidesteps the entire 'issue'. The only victims are the kids stuck with ever more elaborate schemes of learning designed for the innately illiterate or those with no mind for reading in the first place.

Recognizing the issue of innate differences, and assuming we do not consider school to be a rat race for our children, wouldn't the best teaching method be something that makes the kids happier at the same time as they are taught how to read? I wish that we could change our objectives away from ever more elaborate schemes designed for the innately illiterate or those with no mind for reading in the first place, towards something more aligned with making school a more 'harmonious' experience, for a lack of a better term.

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